Basic income – a particularly expensive story

2018-02-02

Andreas Bergh and Mårten Blix, IFN are two of the authors to the anthology Money for Nothing – Essays on Basic Income (Timbro, 2018) “The welfare state […] is based on the theory that if you can work and support yourself you should do so,” writes Bergh. Mårten Blix, has calculated the cost of introducing a basic income/salary. “If all of Sweden’s around 10 million inhabitants would be given a monthly basic income of SEK 12 000 after tax it would be equivalent to [….] 33 percent of GDP. This shouldf be compared to the total expenses in the public sector that amounted to around 50 percent of the GDP in 2016.”

Bergh uses the discussion of basic income as as a starting point for reasoning about recreating the welfare system. Also Blix writes about the need to reform the welfare state.

In a column on the op-ed page in UNT, Sebastian Sundel writes about basic income and the book Money for nothing. He cites Mårten Blix explaining that “one needs to consider that it would cost the state SEK 525 billion to replace the current system with a basic income. Sundel writes that the “most serious problem, if replacing the current system with a basic income, is that the basis for the general welfare system would be challenged fundamentally”.